From the general state of the art, valve arrangements for controlling hydraulic drives are known, in which the control openings for controlling the supply to, and the outflow from the hydraulic drive are connected with each other mechanically or hydraulically. It is often desirable to be able to control the hydraulic drive with a certain speed for all load situations. With valve arrangements, whose control openings for controlling the supply to, and the outflow from the hydraulic drive are connected with each other, in which the speed of the hydraulic drive and the load acting upon the hydraulic drive have the same direction, and in which the supply is controlled, the speed of the hydraulic drive is achieved through a limitation of the outflow. However, this has a negative influence on energy efficiency. Other valve arrangements with connected control openings for controlling the supply to, and the outflow from the hydraulic drive are dimensioned so that both the supply to, and the outflow from the hydraulic drive can be controlled independently of the load. These valve arrangements have a predetermined relation between the supply and the outflow, which also results in poor energy efficiency. Depending on the load direction of the hydraulic drive, avoiding cavitation in such valve arrangements requires several valves, which makes the complete valve arrangement very labor intensive and expensive. For solving these problems, EP 0 809 737 B1, U.S. Pat. No. 5,138,838, U.S. Pat. No. 5,568,759 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,960,695 describe valve arrangements, with which the supply to and the outflow from the hydraulic drive can be controlled separately. However, these solutions do not meet the heavy demands, which exist with regard to the minimum permissible leakage flows at the working connections, when the valves are not active. In operation modes, in which the speed and the load acting upon the hydraulic drive act in the same direction, the speed is controlled by a supply pipe acted upon by the pump pressure, which also results in a poor energy efficiency. U.S. Pat. No. 4,840,111 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,467,264 attempt to avoid the high pressure in the pump line, however, their solution proposals require an unnecessarily high pressure in the tank pipe when lowering the loads, to avoid cavitation. Due to throttling losses, the consequence of the high pressure in the tank pipe is also poor energy efficiency.